| At first, Agnès Jaoui’s The Taste of Others doesn’t appear to have much going for it.
Unlike Amélie, the other French romantic comedy currently in theatres, this film doesn’t stimulate your charmed gland from the get-go. It doesn’t offer buckets of visual whimsy, clever voice-overs or preternaturally beautiful actors to keep your attention. On the candy counter of new movie releases, Taste is a package of licorice next to Amélie’s confection of pop rocks, pixie dust and pull taffy.
What Taste does have is subtlety – not the hottest commodity at the multiplex – and it’s the artful accrual of meaningful details that gives the film surprising emotional impact, something the charming Amélie has slightly less claim to.
The script and performances do wonders with very little, slowly revealing the humanity behind the façades of the inarticulate, manly male characters. The direction, too, is subtle, capturing with great naturalism the way men and women act in public and private spaces. The humour is gentle but sharply observed – rarely has a fully appointed bourgeois living room looked so ghastly.
Special note should be made of Jean-Pierre Bacri, who, like Billy Bob Thornton in The Man Who Wasn’t There, barely changes facial expressions yet gives a moving performance as a man struggling to articulate what feels is lacking in his life. This is iceberg acting, with 10 per cent above the surface and 90 per cent beneath.
Here’s hoping the subtlety won’t be lost in the upcoming avalanche of boffo Christmas fare. |
